Investigate an organic traffic drop

"Traffic is down" is a symptom with at least five different causes, and each one needs a different fix. The job here is to establish the date, the segment and the mechanism before anyone rewrites a page.

Steps

1. Establish the timeline. google_search_console.query with dimensions: ["date"] over the last 16 weeks ending 3 days ago. Compute a 7-day rolling average of clicks and impressions and find the inflection: the first day the average leaves its prior baseline. Say whether the shape is a step (sudden, one day) or a slope (gradual, over weeks). A step points at a technical change or an update; a slope points at decay or seasonality.

2. Confirm the drop is real, not a tracking change. google_analytics.run_report with dimensions: ["date", "sessionMedium"], metrics: ["sessions"] over the same window, and keep organic. If Search Console clicks are flat but GA4 organic sessions fell, the cause is tagging, consent or a filter change, not SEO. Stop and say so.

3. Isolate the segment. Take the 28 days before the inflection and the 28 days after. Run google_search_console.query for each window with dimensions: ["page"], then again with ["query"], ["device"] and ["country"]. Compute the delta per row. The question is whether the loss is concentrated in a few pages or queries, or diffuse across everything in proportion.

4. Diagnose from the pattern.

   • Concentrated, position worse on those pages: ranking loss. Content was overtaken, or those pages changed. Continue with content-decay-audit and keyword-cannibalization-check.
   • Concentrated, impressions near zero: the pages left the index, were redirected, or were noindexed. Continue with technical-crawl-audit.
   • Diffuse, position worse everywhere: site-wide. Either a Google core update or a site-wide change (template, robots, Core Web Vitals). Fetch Google's Search Status Dashboard with your browsing and check whether an update started within a few days of the inflection.
   • Diffuse, impressions down, position flat: demand. Seasonality or the market. Compare against the same weeks last year before calling it a problem.
   • Impressions flat or up, CTR down: the search results page changed shape. AI overviews or new features are absorbing clicks. Continue with ctr-underperformers.
   • Brand queries down: brand demand or a tracking issue, not SEO. Split brand from non-brand with a filters entry on query and report the two separately.

5. Report. Lead with the inflection date, the magnitude (clicks per week before and after), and whether the loss is concentrated or diffuse. Give the diagnosed cause with the evidence pattern that supports it, list the causes you ruled out and why, and name the one playbook to run next. One cause, one next step.

Gotchas

• The last 3 days always look like a drop. Search Console has not finished processing them. End every window 3 days back or the timeline will show a cliff that does not exist.
• An update is not the cause unless the dates line up. A drop that started two weeks before an update was not caused by it. Correlation with a dated event is the strongest evidence this playbook can offer; it is still correlation.
• Migrations reset everything. A move from a URL-prefix property to a domain property, a domain change, or a redesign that changed URLs will look like catastrophic loss on one property and growth on another. Ask whether anything moved.
• Sixteen weeks is not enough for seasonal businesses. If the drop lines up with the same weeks last year, it is seasonality. Pull the year-ago window before diagnosing.
• Total impressions can rise while clicks fall. That is not contradictory; it is the signature of a results page that answers the query without a click.